Dorothy Sheridan – författare

The Mass Observation social research organisation (1937 to early 1950s), a pioneering independent effort aimed at education, specialised in material about everyday life in Britain and recorded material through a panel of around 500 volunteer observers who maintained diaries or replied to open-ended questionnaires known as directives.The collection of papers on film is one of the largest collections on a single theme produced by Mass-Observation but before this book was originally published in 1987 very little of the film material had been put into print. This anthology presents a selection from the Mass-Observation archive which offers unique insights into cinema-going trends, particularly in the years of the Second World War. This is a great reference work on the role of the cinema in national morale and other social effects during the war years with details of people’s behaviour at the cinema and their opinions of the films and the newsreels they saw at the movies.

The Mass Observation social research organisation (1937 to early 1950s), a pioneering independent effort aimed at education, specialised in material about everyday life in Britain and recorded material through a panel of around 500 volunteer observers who maintained diaries or replied to open-ended questionnaires known as directives.The collection of papers on film is one of the largest collections on a single theme produced by Mass-Observation but before this book was originally published in 1987 very little of the film material had been put into print. This anthology presents a selection from the Mass-Observation archive which offers unique insights into cinema-going trends, particularly in the years of the Second World War. This is a great reference work on the role of the cinema in national morale and other social effects during the war years with details of people’s behaviour at the cinema and their opinions of the films and the newsreels they saw at the movies.

The authors of this book analyze the Mass-Observation Project as a way of understanding the nature of writing and the social conditions within which people write, the social purposes they use writing for, and how writing fits in with their life histories, all of which define writing itself. The authors are also interested in how writing is implicated in power relations, and how it is used to establish identities and to transform social situations and relationships. The Mass-Observation Project is a unique institutional context for writing. From the beginning, in Britain, the project involved ordinary people observing and writing about life and collecting those writings for future use by researchers, the media, students and the public in general. The first section of the book describes the Mass-Observation Project, its history and controversies with anthropology. The chapters provide the background necessary for framing the literacy practices described in the rest of the book. Section 2 focuses on the voices of the people who write for Mass-Observation. This part constitutes the raw data of the book and would appeal to readers with a particular interest in everyday writing practices. The discussions in the third section concern personhood, power and identity. The chapters balance description, interpretation and explanation as the Mass-Observation experienced is used to provide insight into the nature of literacy practices in contemporary society.